Structure-oriented merging of revisions of software documents

Abstract

Merging revisions of software documents after development has branched into multiple lines is a difficult task. Previous approaches to merging are either based on text files or refer to specific languages. These approaches do not meet the requirements to a merge tool which is to be integrated into a multilingual structure-oriented environment. In this paper, we present a structure-oriented merge tool that is applicable to software documents (requirements definitions, software architecture descriptions, module implementations, etc.) written in arbitrary languages, preserves their context-free correctness, and also takes binding of identifiers to their declarations into account.